The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

do not care; and the few who both care and
matter do not connect. The root of the paradox runs deeper. It is that the essence
of human nature, in its historical context, and what is essential for a ‘humane’
The End of the Beginning
593
human community, have always been at odds. Put differently, there has always
been a gap between human necessities and human narratives, needs, and wants,
which in fact is the basis of what we call ‘culture’. Even more bluntly, much of
our life is spent ‘immersed in sensual passion, on fire with sensual fever, being
chewed up by our sensual thoughts’. If ‘love’ is the essence, then there ought
to be no issue; if it is avarice, as it seems, then society becomes factitious. And
‘love’ is nothing if not sharing and self-sacrifice; and it is not ‘love’ if we love one
person and ignore or hate the rest. And ‘love’ is not a two-way street; not even
an acknowledgment need be expected. Anyone has a right to love anyone, but
not the right for anything in return. But the reality is that our whole attitude
to life is rooted not in sharing but in reciprocity, which is responsible for much
heart-burn, anger, resentment, and violence. What we have to learn is to separate
the action from the act, like giving and forgetting the gift; smiling, ignoring
the insult, and loving those whom we don’t like. If there is one habit we should
cultivate in a divisive and polarized world, it is ‘sharing’. The spirit of love as
sacrifice is best voiced by Charles Dickens’ character Sydney Carton, in The Tale
of Two Cities (1859). Standing in for Charles Darnay, husband of Lucie Manette,
the woman whom he secretly loves, Sydney goes to the gallows muttering, “It is a
far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that
I go to than I have ever known”. And it is also true that, as Gabriel Garcia
Marquez says, “The invincible power that has moved the world is unrequited,
not happy, love” (Memories of My Melancholy Whores, 2005). ‘Unrequited love
can summon both the very best and the worst from us. When and why ‘romantic
rejection’ or ‘lovesickness’ can make someone a Sydney Carton or a ‘stalker-killer’
is hard to tell. Modern man, buffeted by his own virtuosity and intoxicated by
his own ‘invincible power’, has turned toxic both in his touch and his reach.
He is held hostage by his hubris, and adrift in the sea of his own unbridled
ambition. He is foxed by his own behavior, aghast like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian
Gray at the hideous image in his own mirror, perplexed over what he discovers
he is capable of doing, often the reflection of his darkest depths. In our present
times, so harrowing and haphazard has life become that it has ceased to
be ordinarily possible to distinguish the banal from the bizarre, fiction from
falsehood, normative from the ‘new-normal’. And in his search for safe havens,
man easily falls prey to social viruses like extremism, sectarianism, jingoism,
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
594
terrorism, racism, etc. At the very hour of his smug satisfaction and temporal
triumph, when he seems to be on the brink of achieving his long-sought-after
aspirations, man is stricken by a paralyzing sense of both acute agita and insidious
inadequacy. But that ‘inadequacy’ itself is due to the ‘unnatural’ nature of his
aspirations. The reality is that the part assigned to the human in the grand cosmic
play is of a mortal earthly being. But our yen for immortality and our everyday
awareness that this is impossible to achieve leads to what Miguel de Unamuno
described as the “tragic sense of life”.61 What modern man is attempting to
do is to transform that ‘tragic sense’ into transhumanistic euphoria—“that we
can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should
use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should
merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own
higher ideals”.62
The highest ‘ideal’ we have ever had is divinization. Now, with the help
of modern technology, man, in one magical leap of faith or, as some may say, in
a surge of insanity, is planning to break free from biology and alchemize Homo
sapiens into Homo ‘Deus’.63 So ‘free’ that we can even conceive of, to borrow
an OB Hardison64 phrase, ‘mind children’, who are created and hatched by
downloading the spiritual essence of a person into a machine. But we cannot be
sure if what emerges through such a ‘merger’—dubbed as the Fourth Industrial
Revolution—would be a Deus, or a demon in human form, augment our
capabilities or annihilate us. Without the corresponding consciousness-change,
what Andrew Kimbrell calls ‘metanoia in consciousness’, the high probability
is that the latter is what the ‘marriage’ is more likely to yield. The mindset of
the human, the paradigm of perception and prioritization and the dynamics of
his thinking will not change. Technology will still be misdirected, and artificial
general intelligence will be governed by the same mindset, even if it is a million
times more ‘efficient’. And it will therefore be more dysfunctional and destructive.
Becoming a Deus does not mean we cannot die, or that we will become bulletproof;
it only means we will be able to escape or postpone death in our bed, or
in the hospital. We may not die of cancer, but probably in a car crash, not by a
heart attack, but by homicide. Death will still remain our destiny, but evil will
be more effective in infecting and infiltrating the human world; and globalized
institutional evil will become inter-generational evil. Some say that, although a
The End of the Beginning
595
menacing undertow of horror is so much integral to daily life, still this kind of
‘life’ will be the horror of horrors. That is because, although our ostensible aim is
to transform ourselves into a divine being, what we are actually trying to do is to
catapult from a ‘machine-user’ into a machine, to become a tool of the tool, an
appendage to our own contraption. Some others say that it may well be so, but
there is no other serious alternative for human survival; if man doesn’t become
a ‘god’ and stays earth-bound, he will soon be rendered redundant. What is not
clear is what ‘become’ means; how can anything become something else? The
fact of the matter is that man has always thought of himself as more than a mere
episode in the cosmic process, but never fathomed what his niche is. Spiritualists,
on the other hand, speak in terms of what is called the ‘sacramental way of life’,
of the soul’s search for the ‘Blessed Beloved’, the seeker’s craving for the cosmic
soul. In the Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna says that one must perform every
action sacramentally, and be free from all attachments to the results.65 This holy
longing, this sacramental yearning, is a hidden feeling with many disguises. It
can also go horribly awry if we misplace or misproject it. Furthermore, scriptures
like the Upanishads say that Man already is wholly God. The Isha Upanishad
says, ‘So ham’ (I am He). We must understand that this is not the egotist’s “I am
God!” proclamation, but rather the full realization of the absolute truth that God
is the only Reality. What we forget is that everyone else and everything is also the
same Supreme. By loving them, you are loving God, and in hating or hurting
them, you are hating or hurting the divine.
Those who are pushing for man to be made into a Deus eagerly argue
that the earth will, maybe in a century or two, become inhospitable to human
life, and that man must migrate to the Moon or Mars. But he will not survive
there with a purely ‘lived body’, in the words of Vivian Sobchack, a sentient,
sensual, and sensible ensemble of materialized capacities. Perhaps, as no other
human venture before, this deep driving desire of direct divinity of modern man
affects his mindset and could well determine the future of our species. It may
even hasten our doom. We could even speculate that such a ‘desire’ was seeded
in our consciousness by the Divine Himself, to get rid of us as we have become
too much of a risk to His other offspring. To paraphrase Peter Wessel Zapffe (The
Last Messiah, 1933), the idea is to make us infertile and let the earth be silent
after us. Although the spotlight is on the population explosion, there are reports
The War Within—Between Good and Evil
596
that already at least half of the people in the world live in countries where the
birth rates are at, or below, replacement. The UN projects global population to
peak around 2050 at 7.7 billion, and the decline could then start; where and
how it might end is hard to foresee. As the new book Empty Planet says, “Once
that decline begins, it will never end”.67 For a variety of reasons—from selfishness
to altruism—some say we must be prepared for the ‘extreme step’ of forsaking
‘having children in the future for the future’; the purpose is not to bring kids
into a place ‘where you have to just survive and suffer’. It is also being seen as
a ‘contribution’ to combating the climate crisis. It is said that each child you
choose not to have, can save 58.6 tonnes of carbon a year. One estimate is that
‘if the average number of births falls to a level of 1.3 among the women of the
world, our species would disappear in 300 years’. As a kind of a warning shot and
adding credence to this line of thought, a new study says that Neanderthals, our
closest extinct human relative, became extinct not because of any catastrophic
event but due to a ‘slight decline in fertility’. Could it be that what could blow
in our face might not be Paul Ehrlich’s ‘Population Bomb’ but the opposite? We
don’t know which doomsday scenario will eventually unfold when our time is
up, but a high probability is that it is not human numbers but exponentially
excessive human behavior that could tilt the balance. And to better our behavior
what we need is consciousness-change, not forsaking kids who could in fact undo
the damage that we the adults have done.
To that dire ‘pregnant’ possibility we must add our growing a Draculalike
taste for bloodletting—what Mark Twain called ‘the joy of killing; the joy of
seeing killing done68— which is not new but now seems contagious. Unwittingly,
we could be drifting into a twilight zone of ‘double-danger’; one through radical
reproduction-reduction, and the other by turning killing into a default mode of
conflict resolution. We kill other forms of life without batting an eye, and don’t
even feel that it is ‘killing’; and we kill future life on the plea that ‘life’ is really not
life. And killing, or taking one’s self or that of others, is almost a way to handle
everyday situations and stress, whether the launching pad is a rocky marriage,
spurned love, dreaded school-reopening, making money, wrecking revenge, or
rash road driving. As RD Laing reminds us, “Society highly values its normal
man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to
be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100 million of their fellow normal
The End of the Beginning
597
men in the last fifty years”.69 That is because, as David Buss points out, “a deep
psychology of killing has been and is an essential component of human nature”.70
We live in what Pope John Paul said, “a veritable structure of sin”, and in a
“culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable
culture of death”.71 Yet in this very ‘culture’, paradoxically, we want to erase the
‘certainty of death’. In this effort, we have been looking around for a ‘role model’
in nature. And not finding anything befitting our ego, we have come to the
conclusion that the only worthy ideal could only be a god, someone similar like
a Greek god and Indian deva. In the case of Greek gods, the difference between
human and divine agencies may sometimes not even be discernible. These are
celestial beings, but not the Supreme Soul or cosmic consciousness or ‘the Father
in Heaven’ or the Creator we worship. These ‘beings’ have eternal youth and are
immortal, which is why we want to be them. That might be the aim, but the
possibility, given the fact that so often in the past what we intended to achieve
has yielded something very different, we might end up as the very antithetical
archetype, as the foes of the gods, the rakshasas or demons. That is